(EDIT: You can buy it here.) What happens when you take twenty writers and illustrators and ask them to imagine the future? Well, something fantastic and magical, you can be sure. We know because we did it. And the result is Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a collection of young adult speculative fiction—including six […]
Books
Week #37: My top 10 young adult reads
This list is a result of the Indiblogger #loveofreading topic, asking bloggers to list their 10 favourite books. So I thought I’d put my own spin on things and make it about the young adult novels I loved most. (Disclaimer: My top 10 is subject to change at any time, without any reason!) So here […]
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Week #36: Stories from Okhla
What’s special about your home? That was the question that filmmaker and fellow writer Samina Mishra and her friend Sherna Dastur asked about two dozen children in Okhla, Delhi. In reply, they wrote and drew about their lives and their homes, about ‘the terraces, mosques and train tracks that lead to the villages that their […]
Week #33: Holiday reading round-up
Five books in 16 days is no big deal. But five books in 16 days while on holiday might raise some eyebrows. I’m quite puzzled myself—it must not have been a very exciting holiday if, on average, I read a third of a book every day. As chronicled in my last post, the first 10 […]
Week #32: Travelling light
There is a good reason for the neglect of 52 Weeks of Reading and Writing: I’m on holiday and having too much fun to worry about blogging. But the very mention of holiday brings up the conundrum of reading material. What to take along? How many? Only thin books or fat ones too? Well, this […]
Week #30: Book review of Bad Boy
For a change on time, and a book review too. Bad Boy is the nineteenth Chief Inspector Banks mystery, and time Banks has a very personal stake in things as his daughter is held hostage by a psychopath. As the book blurb says, “A policeman’s daughter should know better.” Read the full review here. ~PD
Week #29: The Hill School project
Once upon a time, there was a coven. Its name was, well, let’s just call it A.S.P. Coven. There was also a cat, he was called Kevin. Of course, he was black. Each member of the coven was vetted by Kevin—legend had it that if he sank his teeth into your ankle, you were accepted. […]
Week #28: The story behind the ghost
(I was asked by my publishers, Scholastic, to do a blog post about the making of There’s a Ghost in My PC, and this is a result of that.) There’s a Ghost in My PC had its genesis in a short story I wrote for a Puffin anthology of ghost stories. I’ve never met a […]
Week #27: Instant wonderland
If there is magic, it has to be in books. Right? I mean, what else can whisk us off to new worlds in an instant, let us hobnob with interesting people and outwit nasty villains, and in general immerse ourselves in great adventures? Heck, what else can pull down a curtain—albeit temporary—on the intense ordinariness […]
Week #26: My favourite bookshops
Would you believe it—we’re at the halfway point of the year! Well, a little past, really, since I’m late in posting this (mostly because the heat and humidity were driving me nuts and now that the rains have come, I feel human again). So now that it’s cool(er) outside and the thought of traipsing out […]